A Golden Afternoon
by QuizzicalSphinx
Summary: A brief, nostaligic piece based on the lives of the real Alice and Lewis Carroll.


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A note: This story is based on the real-life Alice and Lewis Carroll. All of the characters are based on real people--Alice Liddell had four sisters, all of whom are mentioned in the books: Lorina and Edith appear in the Dormouse's story in the "Mad Tea-Party" section (Lorina is Elsie or L.C. for her initials of Lorina Charlotte, Tillie is a nickname taken from Edith's middle name of Matilda, and Alice herself is disguised by the anagram Lacie. The other two girls, Violet and Rhoda, appear as the Violet and the Rose respectively in the "Garden of Live Flowers" chapter of Through the Looking Glass_. The character descriptions are as accurate as I could make them. There is no indication that there was any kind of romantic relationship between Alice and Lewis Carroll (who had many little girls as child-friends and once wrote that he was fond of all children except boys), and I do not mean to imply such a relationship here. _

"A Golden Afternoon"

The longer the afternoon wore on, the oftener Alice's dark round head drifted slowly downward. She would nod, her chin would almost drop to her chest; her long curving lashes, of the sort that only very young girls and very fine dolls were given by their creators, would almost lowered to her cheek--and then she would give a shudder, very like a little cat, and be awake again. This process went on for the better part of an hour before Lorina, happening to catch a

glance at her sister, reached across the younger sister Edith to give Alice's hair a good sharp yank.

"Ouch!" In a moment her back was straight against the schoolchair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes wide awake and darting alertly all about. "Are we finished? Is he here?"

The governess shut the history book, looked down her utterly prim nose at Alice. "I can

see," she said dryly, "that it is absolutely useless to continue the lesson _this_ afternoon. You are all dismissed. I expect you to know this lesson by heart when next we read."

"Yes, Miss Prickett. Good afternoon, Miss Prickett." Alice grabbed Edith by the right hand, Lorina by the left, and boldly dragged them both out behind her. Once in the hall she released them and bolted headlong down the rear stair, with both Lorina and Edith calling behind her, "Alice! Alice!"

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It is so lovely to run down a stair. I wish I could slide down the balustrade, but Mamma shrieked so when she caught me at it, that is much better to run. When you run you are always feeling as if you are just going to tumble forward, as if your head were so far ahead that you might topple, but you never quite do topple, that is the curious bit. I wonder what it should be like if I ever fell down the stairs. That's what Mamma screamed about: 'Alice, you will break all your bones and kill yourself, and then where would you be?' Where would I be, I wonder?

"The Reverend Dodgson is here to see your father," said Maddie, sweeping by in her drab serving dress and white apron. Between her hands was a platter heaped with special crustless tea sandwiches--mostly watercress and mayonnaise, which made Alice sick, but there was goose liver pate which she adored--and almond macaroons, tangy plum fluff and seed cakes. "I expect he'll be wanting some time with you gels as well. Go in, if you want, but don't be carrying on like a

monkey on a stick."

Alice cracked the door just a bit. It was naughty to peek, but it gave her a secret thrill listened when the grown-ups talked to one another, and it was even wickeder to watch. Especially in the drawing room, where the looking glasses on either wall watched each other and you could see the two men at the table before the windows, reflected into forever. Papa still wore the suit he'd worn to breakfast. Reverend Dodgson wore, as ever, a neat black suit with a sparkling white cravat. He was very slim, all knobs and knees. His curls were very slightly wet, as if he'd just combed them.

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Alice had asked him once how his hair was so curly, and wished that her hair would behave so, curling up so nicely at the back of her head, then tumbling down. 'Lorina has such nice plump curls, but Mamma does them up with a warm poker, and I shouldn't like that at all. I would be afraid of burning my ears off.'

'Do you know what makes your sister's hair curl, when your mother uses the poker on it like that?' he had asked her. 'She threatens it. I suppose you would do anything you were told, too, if someone wrapped you around a hot poker!'

'I suppose I shall have to what I am told someday,' said Alice, resting her chin despondently on her forearms. 'When I am grown up.'

He patted her shoulder gently, with deep regret. 'One has to do a great many unpleasant things,' he replied. 'When one is grown-up.'

"Alice? Alice, you great skulking thing, what are you doing in that corner? Come here at once."

Her father drew her out of the chimney corner where she'd hidden herself between the mantle and the big footstool. Reverend Dodgson stood up, pulled out a chair for her as if she were Mama, with an odd little smile that seemed to jerk up higher in one corner than the other. "G-g-g-good ah-ahfternoon, A-A-Alice." His voice was hushed and whispery.

"Are your sisters coming down?" Father asked her. "I believe the Reverend had mentioned something of a boat ride . . . ?" Father lifted one eyebrow and smiled at the Reverend, a rarity for him.

"Yes, Father. I believe they just--"

Little Edith rushed in with Rhoda, who squealed "Daddy, Daddy," and rushed into his arms as if she had been a baby, when she was really almost four. Edith would have done the same, no doubt, if Lorina, a vision of her almost thirteen years of maturity, had not snatched her arm and pinched the back of her hand.

"Good afternoon, Reverend Dodgson," she said, curtsying, and yanking Edith's sash so that she would bob down likewise.

"Oh." Alice managed a hasty curtsy, noticing as she did that there was a smear of blacking on her stocking and that the lace hem of her pinafore (which she had only just pinned up that morning) had fallen down again. "Good afternoon, Reverend."

Rhoda pointed at the Reverend and laughed, "Storytime, storytime!"

Before Lorina could even move, Alice bent to her youngest sister. "Now, now, Rhoda, the Reverend is here to see Father." She let her dark, twinkling eyes slide sidelong toward the Reverend. "Perhaps later, if he has the time, he'll tell us all a story."

"Perhaps I m-m-might," he said, and Rhoda chirruped.

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I have never (wrote the good Reverend Dodgson in his private journal) seen a child more seductive than young Alice Liddell. Nothing about her is base or earthy, but everything she says or does seems to be calculated in such a way as to be so wonderfully, innocently childlike; I cannot image another of the female species, save Eve before her fall, who might move with such utter surety and charm. I might go so far, if I did not know better, as to call her a fairy-child.

Later on this section of the journal was torn out and thrown away. Perhaps the good Reverend, striving as he did to be modest in all ways, in word and thought, found it unbecoming to speak in such a way about a mere child.

"Once," he began as the lot of them walked down the riverbank to the punt, "there were two fiddles, a husband and his wife. Only she preferred to be called a violin, as it placed her in a higher class of society."

"Fiddles?" Lorina began incredulously, but Alice said, "Hush!" and went on listening intently.

"They lived in a Casement, as all fiddles do, but the wife had looked in through a shop window one day and seen a Stratavarious hung upon the wall--for display, you know--and had thought it a fine life, for the shopkeeper kept it shining clean and dusted it twice a day."

"The wall or the fiddle?" asked Rhoda in all innocence, whereupon Lorina thumped her earlobe and hissed, "The fiddle, ninny!"

The reverend turned around, towering over Lorina, who suddenly seemed to wither.

"Young lady," he said coldly, "that is the second time I have seen you yanking or pulling or pinching one of your sisters today, and I assure you, it is not at all ladylike. I don't know where you picked up this vicious temper you seem to have today, but if you don't put it down at once I

will throw you into the river."

"I have the stomachache," Lorina muttered crossly, rubbing her belly, and indeed a brief grimace of pain contorted her face. The Reverend suddenly turned pale and glanced away hastily.

Rhoda crept up close and tugged once, very politely, on the cuff of his coat. "Story."

"Oh." He trailed off, looking deep into the green river as if watching for trout. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten the rest. I expect you'll have to remember it for me and write it down."

"You might tell us another story about going down the rabbit-hole," said Edith. "And the enormous puppy, and trying to get into the garden."

"Ah, another Wonderland story, do you mean? I'm not even certain I can, Edith. I seem to be out of Wonderland stories."

"I can tell one," said Alice brightly. "I've made one up." And Alice, who could never resist a chance to recite, plunged into the story without a word from the others.

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One day as I--I mean, as the Other Alice--as she was trying to finish darning a stocking that she'd torn a hole in, not from any fault of her own but because it had caught on that silly old hod-hook in the drawing room that had broken off, she happened to drop her spool and it rolled away, the way that they do. And it rolled right out of the sitting room door and left a thread behind it, and the Other Alice took hold of one end of the thread and followed it. She followed it right out the door and down the hall. And they she saw that the thread was going up the stairs, to the nursery, and so she went upstairs and saw that the thread was going right up the chimney. She tugged on it to shake it out, but then something gave a great tug on the other end of it and whisked up straight up the chimney flue, and she was flying through the air and hanging on to her bit of string for dear life.

She flew up higher and higher, and could see her house beneath her feet getting smaller and smaller, and she said "Oh no, this time I shall really never get home!" Just before her lay the moon, and the moon is made of green cheese you know, so she might be able to squeeze it and get milk, although she should be dreadfully sick if she had to live on green cheese forever! And finally her feet touched the moon.

All around her were little tiny furry things like kittens, and one of the kittens was such a dear blue thing that she said to it, "Oh, I wish I could take you home!" And then she realized she would never get home, and she started to cry, and all the kitten-things ran away.

But the blue kitten's tail got longer and longer, and started to twist up, until it formed letters like longhand. And the letters said, "You mustn't cry here! Here on the moon, we are all terrible thin creatures, like swansdown, and if we get wet we melt. I'm surprised you're not melting, your face is all wet." And then the tail changed and the letters said, "Here, I shall take you to the Princess of the Moon, and she will find away to get you home."

So Alice followed the kitten, and the more she followed she got smaller and softer, and soon she had turned all furry; in fact, she was a Pink Kitten. And the Blue Kitten explained, "Of course you've turned into a kitten; here on the moon we were all once little girls and boys, but we turned into kittens. We are children who did not want to grow up and go to school, so we all come here and play games forever, and we're all very happy." But Alice saw them playing the most awful games--painting each other with stripes like Red Indians, and sticking things into their noses and ears--that she wanted to hurry up and get to the Princess as soon as she could.

"This is a silly story!" cried Lorina. "Where does it go?"

Flustered and angry, Alice snapped back, "It goes on until she finds the Princess of the Moon, and it is not a silly story, it's a Wonderland story, and I'd like to see you tell a better one!"

"Anyone could make up a better story than that! Even Edith could--"

"Girls!" said the Reverend, "girls!" but Alice, wiping angrily at her nose, turned and ran down the riverbank toward home.

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He will come following me, she thought as she ran. _He will take out his handkerchief and wipe my face and say, "There, there, Lorina was just jealous. That was a wonderful story, and if you tell me the rest I shall write it into a book and everyone will read it and wonder how I came up with such a marvelous idea. And I shall tell them it was you and you'll be famous." Won't Lorina turn white with rage then?_

She reached the garden, and hid herself in the little hollow of hedges which she fancied a grotto--or a rabbit hole, depending on her mood--and which was her special hiding spot. Sharp twigs pricked and scraped her arms, and little leaves got into her hair. The grotto was quite a bit tighter than she remembered it. _I've gotten too big_, she thought. _It's been months since I was here_

last. 

She broke off twigs all around and tried to make the hole bigger, so that she could sit up straight. Still, the grotto was much too small, and finally she forsook it and went to play on the garden swing.

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I shouldn't hide, at any rate. Surely he's hurrying back right now, so I'll want to be where he can see me. "Alice, you shouldn't let that awful Lorina bother you. She only envies you because you are ever so much prettier and cleverer than she. Who cares about her being old enough to wear high boots and keep her hair in curls and sit at the dinner table with Mother and Father. You--"

But he did not come.

It grew late and chill. The first stars came out in the east, but he did not come to comfort her. She heard the front gate rattle and the sound of Edith and Rhoda laughing, and Violet asking them questions about the ride. Violet had had a cold all week, and her mother thought the river too damp for her throat; Alice heard Mother calling for Violet to "come into the nice warm house,

darling, it's far too late to be out of doors." Even Lorina was laughing. The Reverend was saying something to them all, but Alice was too far off to hear it.

Her burning brown eyes glared over the top of the back gate. _I thought I was your favorite._

She came in through the parlor doors and went round to the front entrance. Mother was saying, "Thank you, they do enjoy it so," and the Reverend was putting his scarf around his neck, preparing to leave, when he caught sight of Alice rounding the corner.

"There you are. We all thought you'd seen another rabbit, and had darted off again. How was the centre of the earth to-day?" His voice was quite soft; he never stuttered when he was with her, she had noticed, though she heard some of his students mocking him after lectures. He caught something in her eyes, a glittering, and ran his gloved finger along her cheek. It came away moist. "Might Alice walk me to the front gate?"

"So long as it's just a minute. Run along, Alice, it's getting dark already."

Lorrina smirked at her. She would have risked slapping her, but Mamma was standing over them, and Mr. Dodgeson looking right at her. She crept out the door behind him, down the darkened path.

"I wish there was a Wonderland. I wish I could go to the moon, and not have to take my lessons and listen to old Lorina forever telling me how senseless and stupid I am."

"Of course you know that the moon is nothing but a stone in the sky," he said quietly. "And there's nothing in the centre of the earth but more earth all the way through. There are no places to hide from growing up."

"Is it so terrible?" She wiped her face with his handkerchief and looked up with that peculiar intense look that so unsettled him (_not the look of an ordinary child_, he had thought more than once), as if she could bore into him and read the thoughts in his head as clear as if they were written out on pages. "I never thought about it before, you are so different from the rest of the adults, but you are a grown-up, so you know all about it."

"Not all about it," he admitted. "I never got used to it, myself. One day I was ten and going to school, and only a few years later I was thirty, and teaching young men who were no older than I was only a little while before. One doesn't really get old, Alice. Old gets _you_."

"Is it so very terrible to get old?" she asked, looking worried.

"I would not say terrible," he said. "But it is nothing like being young. Given the choice between the two I should think most people would stay young."

"I suppose that is why we are not given the choice," she sighed. "Otherwise the world would be full of children, and nothing would ever be done."

"Quite true."

"But does it hurt? Mamma talks of growing pains, and I think Lorina's got them. Her stomach pains her so, and she is in ever such a foul temper now-a-days."

"Some bits of it are pleasant enough," he said. "No more lessons, that's one thing you'll enjoy. Of course with you you shall be married one day, and have little girls of your own, and I'm sure that will be happy."

"If I have little girls," she said, with a sudden, eager flush to her cheeks, "will you come and visit them, as you do now? You can take them rowing, and tell them stories, and show them how to make things--"

"Alice, Alice dear!" he interrupted, laughing. "By the time you have children I shall be a very old man. God willing that I should live at all."

"I think we should marry," Alice said firmly. "When I am old enough, may we?"

He hefted her up into his arms, as he used to do before Mamma proclaimed both Alice and Edith far too heavy and too old to be picked up by anyone, even Father. In his arms she wasn't the least heavy or awkward. He curled her up into the cradle of his right arm as if she weighed no more than a bag of flour. "I will be old even by the time you are old enough to marry. Far too old to wed a young thing like yourself. You will no doubt find a man more your own age, and move away to a house of your own."

"Lots of young women marry old men," Alice said with great authority. "Mamma says it's a right scandal, how these sixteen year old girls are always pushing themselves at fifty-year-old men with investments. Although, I don't altogether understand what investments are. Aren't they those suit jackets with special pockets inside for your watch?"

He laughed at her. "Alice dear, I fear you and your eavesdropping are going to uncover the entire range of the human experience before you turn twenty."

"I don't care about your investments, anyway." She twisted his lapel in her hand and turned her pleading face up to him. "Sixteen-year-old girls are just silly, that's all. Lorina is only thirteen and she is silly enough. When I turn thirteen I'm going to be sensible."

"Everybody thinks that, Alice, but not many can manage it. I was very much what you would call silly at thirteen, and at sixteen too, for that matter. I'm almost forty, and people are still calling me a silly old man who writes very silly books about kind of mathmatics that no one understands and fairy places that never existed."

She cuddled into his arms, her short brush of hair tickling his ear as she leaned forward to whisper. "I don't think you're silly a bit."

"Yours is the opinion that matters to me."

"Let's be married. You and I."

"Can you darn socks? Hem a pair of trousers? Make a decent pot of tea?" 

She frowned and bit her lower lip to show her doubt as to the quality of her sock-mending and tea-making prowess, but nodded.

He seemed to consider her a moment, and she wondered briefly if she would do. There was a small flurry of hands as she dusted hedge leaves from her skirt, ran a hand over her hair to test for stray strands and twigs, and cursed (a mild "drat!") at the unforgivable state of blacking- smeared sock. He gave her that strange half-smile of his, one corner of his mouth quirking, then

shrugged a shoulder.

"Well, then, let's be married. A good sock-darner is all a man needs, really."

He knelt on the grass, bringing himself down to her eye level, and taking both her tiny hands in his, said, "I, Charles Dodgson, do hereby promise to hold a special place in my heart for my beloved Alice Liddell, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer, no matter how old or grown-up she may become. Now you."

"I, Alice Pleasance Liddell, promise to hold a special place in my heart for the Reverend Mr. Dodgson forever and ever, no matter how grown-up I may be." She looked up at him with the grave, gentle eyes he admired. "Now we must kiss. That's what married people do."

He kissed her lightly, and Alice, with a devilish little sparkle of mischief, kissed back.

He brushed from her skirt a twig she had missed "That's my lovely girl. Now run inside. You'll see me tomorrow afternoon, and then you can finish the story of Alice on the moon. And I promise you that Lorina shan't say a single word."

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My lovely Alice turned twenty today (he wrote in his journal). She is far too grown-up for fairy tales, though she is not so contrary as her sister Lorina at that age. Her simple and fond heart, so darling in her youth, has matured into innocent wisdom, as I hoped it would. Though I thought she must have forgotten our vows in the dusky garden, she presented herself to me, curtseyed nicely, then on the sly gave me the secret pressure of the hand that is our especial greeting. Old man that I am, and growing simple in my age, tears welled up in my eyes. She has not forgotten her dottering Dodo, no matter how old we have both grown!

I mark this day with a white stone.

(These entries were among those disposed of by Dodgson in his later years; perhaps he found it too provocative to remember marriage vows made to a girl of eleven. In later years, Alice and the reverend were estranged, and Alice came to regard him as somewhat of an embarrassment. Alice Hargreaves, nee Liddell, married well and lived long. The Reverend Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, had great initial success with his children's books and stageplays, but toward the end of his life their popularity waned. He died alone and near poverty.)


End file.
